The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Is she dead?” I asked, the words slipping almost nonsensically from my lips.

  “No one dies. You know that. You’ve known that since the camp. No one ever dies.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “She’s with the wolf,” the woman whispered. “Three weeks now, she’s with the wolf. You came too late, Dorry. You came to her too late,” and she drew a knife from her belt, something crude and heavy fashioned from scrap metal. “She isn’t waiting anymore.”

  I kicked her hard, the toe of my right boot catching her in the chest just below her collar bone, and the priest cried out and fell over backwards. The knife slipped from her fingers and skittered away across the concrete.

  “Did the wolf tell you that you’d never die?” I demanded, getting to my feet and aiming the pistol at her head. I’d bought that in Bosporos, as well, the same day I’d bought the map, black-market military picked up cheap in the backroom of a britch bar. The blinking green ready light behind the sight assured me that the safety was off, that the trip cells were hot, and there was a live charge in the chamber. The woman coughed and clutched at her chest, then spat something dark onto the floor.

  “That’s what I want to know, bitch,” I said, “what I want you to tell me,” and I kicked her in the ribs. She grunted and tried to crawl away, so I kicked her again, harder than before, and she stopped moving. “I want you to tell me if that’s what it promised you, that you’d fucking get to live forever if you brought it whatever it needed. Because I want you to know that it fucking lied.”

  And she opened her mouth wide, then, and I caught a glimpse of the barbed thing uncoiling from the hollow beneath her tongue, and I squeezed the trigger.

  I suspect that one gunshot was the loudest noise anyone’s heard here since the day bombs fell on Lowell. It echoed off the thick walls, all that noise trapped in such a little room, and left my ears ringing painfully. The priest was dead, and I sat down on my bedroll again. I’d never imagined that there would be so much blood or that killing someone could be so very simple. No, that’s not true. That’s a goddamn lie. I’ve imagined it all along.

  I’ve been sitting here on the roof for the last hour, watching as the domeworks begin to mimic the morning light, shivering while the frost clinging to the old masonry melts away as the solar panels warm the air of Lowell. I brought the monk’s book with me and half a bottle of whiskey and the gun. And my notebook, to write the last of it down.

  When the bottle is empty, maybe then I’ll make a decision. Maybe then I’ll know what comes next.

  A CHILD’S GUIDE TO THE HOLLOW HILLS

  BENEATH THE LOW leaf-litter clouds, under endless dry monsoons of insect pupae, strangling rains of millipede droppings, and noxious fungal spores, in this muddy, thin land pressed between soil and bedrock foundations, the fairie girl awakens in the bed of the Queen of Decay. She opens her violet eyes and sees, again, that it was not only some especially unpleasant dream or nightmare, her wild descent, her pell-mell tumble from light and day and stars and moonshine, down, down, down to this mouldering domain of shadow walls and gnarly taproot obelisks. She is here, after all. She is still here, and slowly she sits up, pushing away those clammy spider-spun sheets that slip in and tangle themselves about her whenever she dares to sleep. And what, she thinks, is sleep, but admitting to myself this is no dream? Admitting that she has been snared and likely there will be no escape from out this unhappy, foetid chamber. Always she has been afraid of falling, deathly frightened of great heights and holes and wells and all the very deep places of the world. Always she has watched so carefully where fell her feet, and never was she one to climb trees or walls, not this cautious fairie girl. When her bolder sisters went to bathe where the brook grows slow and wide beneath drooping willow boughs, she would venture no farther in than the depth of her ankles. They laughed and taunted her with impromptu fictions of careless, drowning children and hungry snapping turtle jaws and also an enormous catfish that might swallow up any careless fairie girl in a single lazy gulp of its bristling, barbeled lips. And you only looked beneath a stone, the Queen sneers, reminding her that she is never precisely alone here, that her thoughts are never only her thoughts. Your own mother, she told you that your sisters were but wicked liars, and there was no monster catfish or snapping turtles waiting in the brook. But, she said, do not go turning over stones. And the fairie girl would shut her violet eyes now, but knows too well she’d still hear that voice, which is like unto the splintering of granite by frost, the ceaseless tunneling noises of earthworms and moles, the crack of a goblin’s whip in air that has never once seen the sky. Don’t you go looking under stones, the Queen says again and smiles to show off a hundred rusted-needle teeth. In particular, said she—your poor, unheeded mother—beware the great flat stones that lie in the oldest groves, scabbed over with lichens and streaked with the glinting trails of slugs, the flat stones that smell of salamanders and moss, for these are sometimes doorways, child. The Queen laughs, and her laughter is so terrible that the fairie girl cringes and does close her eyes. Disobedient urchin, you knew better. “I was following the green lizard,” she whispers, as though this might be some saving defence or extenuation, as if the Queen of Decay has not already heard it from her countless times before. “The green lizard crawled beneath the stone—” —which you knew damn well not to lift and look beneath. So, here now. Stop your whimpering. You were warned; you knew better. “I wanted only to find the lizard again. I never meant to—” You only came knocking at my door, dear sweet thing. I only answered and showed you in. You’d have done well not to entrust your well-being to a fascination with such lowly, squamous things—serpents and lizards and the dirty, clutching feet of birds. The fairie girl opens her eyes again, trying not to cry, because she almost always cries, and her tears and sobs so delight the Queen. She sees herself staring back with watery sapphire eyes, reflected in the many mirrors hanging from these filthy walls, mirrors which her captor ordered hung all about the chamber so that the girl might also witness the stages of her gradual dissolution. The fracturing and wearing away of her glamour, even as water etches at the most indurate stone. Her eyes have not yet lost their colour, but they have lost their inner light. In the main, her skin is still the uncorrupted white of fresh milk caught inside a milkmaid’s pail, but there are ugly, parchment splotches that have begun to spread across her face and arms and chest. And her hair, once so full and luminous, has grown flat and devoid of lustre, without the sympathetic light of sun or moon, wilting even as her soul wilts. She is drinking me, the girl thinks, and, Yes, the Queen replies. I have poured you into my silver cup, and I am drinking you down, mouthful by mouthful. You have a disagreeable taste upon my tongue, but it is a sacred duty, to consume anything so frail as you. I choke you down, lest your treacle and the radiance of you should spread and spoil the murk. And all around them the walls, wherever there are not mirrors, twitch and titter, and fat trolls and raw-boned redcaps with phosphorescent skins and hungry, bulging eyes watch the depredations of their queen. This is rare sport, and the Queen is not so miserly or selfish that she will not share the spectacle with her subjects. See, she says, but do not touch. Her flesh is deadly as cold iron to the likes of us. I alone have the strength to lay my hands upon so foul a being and live. In the mirrors hung on bits of root and bone and the fishhook mandibles of beetles, the fairie girl sits on the black bed far below the forest floor, and the Queen of Decay moves across her like an eclipse of the sun. Do not go looking under stones, your poor mother said. I have heard from the pillbugs and termites that she is a wise woman. You’d have done well to heed her good advices. It is hard for the girl to see the Queen, for she is mostly fashioned of some viscous, shapeless substance that is not quite flesh, but always there is the dim impression of leathery wings, as if from some immense bat, and wherever the Queen brushes against the girl, there is the sensation of touching, or being touched by, matted fur and the blasted bark of dying, lightning-struck trees. The
day the girl chased the quick green lizard through the forest, she was still whole, her maidenhead unbroken, the task of her deflowering promised—before her birth—to a nobleman, an elfin duke who held his court on the shores of a sparkling lake and was long owed a considerable debt by her father. The marriage would settle that account. Would have settled that account, for the Queen took the fairie girl’s virginity almost at once. We’ll have none of that here, she said, slipping a sickle thumb between the girl’s pale thighs and pricking at her sex. There was only as much pain as she’d always expected, and hardly any blood, but the certain knowledge, too, that she had been undone, ruined, despoiled, and if ever she found some secret stairway leading up and out of the Queen’s thin lands, her escape would only bring shame to her family. Better a daughter lost and dead and picked clean by the ants and crows, the Queen of Decay told her, than one who’s given herself to me, who’s soiled my bedclothes with her body’s juices and played my demimondaine. “Nothing was given,” replied the fairie girl, and how long ago was that? A month? A season? Only a single night? There is no time in the land of the Queen of Decay. There is no need of time when despair would serve so well as the past and all possible futures. Mark it all the present and be done. What next? the Queen asks, mocking the laws of her own timeless realm. Have you been lying here, child, asking yourself, what is next in store for me? “No,” says the girl, refusing to admit the truth aloud, even if the Queen could hear it perfectly well unspoken. “I do not dwell on it,” the girl lies. “You will do as you will, and neither my fear nor anticipation will stay your hand or teach you mercy.” And then the Queen swells and rises up around her like a glistening, alveolate wreath of ink and sealing wax, and the spectators clinging to the walls or looking out from their nooks and corners hold their breath, collectively not breathing as though in that moment they have become a single beast divided into many bodies. I only followed the lizard, the fairie girl thinks, trying not to hear the wet and stretching noises leaking from the Queen’s distorted form, trying not to think what will happen one second later, or two seconds after that. It was so pretty in the morning sun. Its scales were a rainbow fashioned all of shades of green, a thousand shades of green, and she bows her head and strains to recall the living warmth of sunlight on her face. Show me your eyes, child, growls the Queen of Decay. We will not do this thing halfway. And, reminded now of misplaced details, the girl replies, “Its eyes were like faraway red stars twinkling in its skull. I’d never before seen such a lizard—verdant, iridian, gazing out at me with crimson eyes.” The moldy air trapped within the chamber seems to shudder then, and the encircling mesh that the Unseelie queen has made of herself draws tighter about the girl from the bright lands that are ever crushing down upon those who must dwell below. I have not taken everything, the Queen says. Not yet. We’ve hardly begun, and the fairie girl remembers that she is not chasing a green lizard with red eyes on a summer’s morning, that she has finally fallen into that abyss—the razor jaws of a granddaddy snapping turtle half buried in silt and waterlogged poplar leaves, or the gullet of a catfish that has waited long years in the mud and gloom to make a meal of her. There is always farther to fall. This pool has no bottom. She will sink until she at last forgets herself, and still she will go on sinking. She glances up into the void that the Queen of Decay has not bothered to cover with a mask, and something which has hidden itself under the black bed begins to snicker loudly. You are mine, Daughter, says the Queen. And a daughter of loam and toadstools should not go about so gaudily attired. It is indecent, and, with that, her claws move swiftly and snip away the girl’s beautiful dragonfly wings. They slip off her shoulder, falling from ragged stumps to lie dead upon the spider sheets. “My wings,” the girl whispers, unsurprised and yet also disbelieving, this new violation and its attendant hurt seeming hardly more real than the bad dreams she woke from some short time ago (if there were time here). “You’ve taken my wings from me,” and she reaches for them, meaning to hide them away beneath a pillow or within the folds of her stained and tattered shift before any greater harm is done to those delicate, papery mosaics. But the Queen, of course, knows the girl’s will and is far faster than she; the amputated wings are snatched up by clicking, chitinous appendages which sprout suddenly from this or that dank and fleshy recess, then ferried quickly to the sucking void where a face should be. The Queen of Decay devours the fairie girl’s wings in an instant, less than half an instant. And there below the leaf-litter clouds and the rustling, grub-haunted roof of this thin, thin world, the Queen, unsated, draws tight the quivering folds of her honeycomb skin and falls upon the screaming, stolen child . . .

  . . . and later, the girl is shat out again—that indigestible, fecal lump of her which the Queen’s metabolism has found no use for, whatever remains when the glamour and magick have been stripped away by acid and cruel enzymes and a billion diligent intestinal cilia. This dull, undying scat which can now recall only the least tangible fragments of its life before the descent, before the fall, before the millennia spent in twisting, turning passage through the Queen’s gut, and it sits at one of the mirrors which its mistress has so kindly, so thoughtfully, provided and watches its own gaunt face. On the bed behind it, there is a small green lizard with ruby eyes, and the lizard blinks and tastes the stale, forest-cellar air with a forked tongue the colour of ripe blackberries. Perhaps, thinks the thing that is no longer sprite—or nymph—or pixie, that is only this naked stub of gristle, perhaps you were once a dragon, and then she swallowed you, as she swallowed me, and all that is left now is a little green lizard with red eyes. The lizard blinks again, neither confirming nor denying the possibility, and the thing staring back at itself from the mirror considers conspiracy and connivance, the lovely little lizard only bait to lead her astray, that she might wander alone into a grove of ancient oaks and lift a flat, slug-streaked stone and . . . fall. The thing in the mirror is only the wage of its own careless, disobedient delight, and with one skeletal hand, it touches wrinkled fingertips to the cold, unyielding surface of the looking glass, reaching out to that other it. There is another green lizard, trapped there inside the mirror, and while the remains of the feast of the Queen of Decay tries to recall what might have come before the grove and the great flat stone and the headlong plunge down the throat of all the world, the tiny lizard slips away, vanishing into the shadows that hang everywhere like murmuring shreds of midnight.

  THE AMMONITE VIOLIN (MURDER BALLAD NO. 4)

  IF HE WERE EVER to try to write this story, he would not know where to begin. It’s that sort of a story, so fraught with unlikely things, so perfectly turned and filled with such wicked artifice and contrivances that readers would look away, unable to suspend their disbelief even for a page. But he will never try to write it, because he is not a poet or a novelist or a man who writes short stories for the newsstand pulp magazines. He is a collector. Or, as he thinks of himself, a Collector. He has never dared to think of himself as The Collector, as he is not without an ounce or two of modesty, and there must surely be those out there who are far better than he, shadow men, and maybe shadow women, too, haunting a busy, forgetful world that is only aware of its phantoms when one or another of them slips up and is exposed to flashing cameras and prison cells. Then people will stare, and maybe, for a time, there is horror and fear in their dull, wet eyes, but they soon enough forget again. They are busy people, after all, and they have lives to live, and jobs to show up for five days a week, and bills to pay, and secret nightmares all their own, and in their world there is very little time for phantoms.

  He lives in a small house in a small town near the sea, for the only time the Collector is ever truly at peace is when he is in the presence of the sea. Even collecting has never brought him to that complete and utter peace, the quiet which finally fills him whenever there is only the crash of waves against a granite jetty and the saltwater mists to breathe in and hold in his lungs like opium fumes. He would love the sea, were she a woman. And sometimes h
e imagines her so, a wild and beautiful woman clothed all in blue and green, trailing sand and mussels in her wake. Her grey eyes would contain hurricanes, and her voice would be the lonely toll of bell buoys and the cries of gulls and a December wind scraping itself raw against the shore. But, he thinks, were the sea but a woman, and were she his lover, then he would have her, as he is a Collector and must have all those things he loves, so that no one else might ever have them. He must draw them to him and keep them safe from a blind and busy world that cannot even comprehend its phantoms. And having her, he would lose her, and he would never again know the peace which only she can bring.

  He has two specialties, this Collector. There are some who are perfectly content with only one, and he has never thought any less of them for it. But he has two, because, so long as he can recall, there has been this dual fascination, and he never saw the point in forsaking one for the other. Not if he might have them both and yet be a richer man for sharing his devotion between the two. They are his two mistresses, and neither has ever condemned his polyamorous heart. Like the sea, who is not his mistress but only his constant savior, they understand who and what and why he is, and that he would be somehow diminished, perhaps even undone, were he forced to devote himself wholly to the one or the other. The first of the two is his vast collection of fossilized ammonites, gathered up from the quarries and ocean-side cliffs and the stony, barren places of half the globe’s nations. The second are all the young women he has murdered by suffocation, always by suffocation, for that is how the sea would kill, how the sea does kill, usually, and in taking life he would ever pay tribute and honor to that first mother of the world.